Regretfulness
by Princess Helyn
Summary: LightXMisa happiness! Well, not really now, but that's the direction it's going.  8D Review please!
1. Chapter 1

Light couldn't believe what was happening. For the first time he could remember, he actually had to fight to keep his cool. He was God; they could not be defying him! _What kind of joke is this? _He thought desperately, _is this another trick of his to make me admit I'm Kira? _Light knew he was lying to himself. He knew there was no way this was a joke, especially when Near had admitted to knowing so much. He was defeated.

_Think, _he ordered himself, _just _think, _dammit! There has to be a way out of this. There always is… _He took a deep breath and decided on a plan. If he could just get far enough away that they wouldn't be able to get to him before he finished writing Near's name… yes, that would work. He just had to get farther away.

Light continued talking, rambling hopelessly to kill some more time and maybe even make an impression and get through to some of his dim-witted associates. He was far enough away. Feeling slightly more confident and looking as calm as was humanly possible in this situation, Light carefully slipped out the piece of Death Note he had hidden in his watch. Trying to look nonchalant and to keep his hand hidden behind his body, he started writing the name as fast as he could. Nate… _BANG. _For a second he didn't know what was happening. He'd felt a horrible pain in his hand just before he heard the noise, but it hadn't registered with him as being a gunshot until after he put the two together. Who had had the nerve to just _shoot him?_

Light whipped around to look at who had dared shoot KIRA, and saw none other than Matsuda. He stood like that for an unbearable millisecond and then started screaming. "Matsuda…?" was all he could think to say at first, "YOU IDIOT! WHO DO YOU THINK YOU'RE SHOOTING, MATSUDA? DAMN YOU! IF YOU'RE GOING TO SHOOT SOMEONE, SHOOT THE OTHERS!" Light was breathing heavily now. His former accomplice's ignorance was simply beyond belief. "What do you think you're doing…?" He repeated. He knew it was all in vain but he couldn't help needing the last word. "I thought you were the only person who understood me! Kira is righteous! Kira is needed!" He was only speaking his thoughts aloud but it was at least mildly productive in the respect that it was buying him time. He continued talking for no real reason other than to defend his pride against that idiot Matsuda. Light had calmed down slightly and, still desperate to kill Near and get back to fixing his world, he started writing his last name in his own blood. He just had to finish… three more letters… he _knew _this would work, but his hand moved so slowly and painfully… two more letters… one… _BANG__!_

He almost blacked out. On top of his momentary deafness from the gunshot, Light was so sunned that for a second the world grew into a painful silence. He saw blood—his own—and he didn't want to know what had happened, but he had to. He might still have a chance if he could just stay conscious for long enough to _think_. He could do this…

He fell to the ground. His own blood was pooling around him and for the first time in his living memory he was feeling utterly defeated. There HAD to be a way out of this. He was Light Yagami… Kira… _God_: if he couldn't get out of this… well that was an impossibility. He _had_ to get out of it, so he would.

The world shifted around him again, and he held on for his life. He could do this. He _had_ to do this.  
"MIKAMI!" he cried desperately, "What are you doing? Help me write their names down! KILL THEM!" But Light had lost yet another loyal idiot to Near. Near who was calmly watching as he bled to death, making arrangements for him to be taken to jail. "M… Misa…?" He tried, but Near—once again disgustingly calm—explained how she wouldn't be helping him.

"Takada?" But Near calmly informed him that she was dead… dead, had _he _done that?

"Ryuk!" he cried, finally having come up with something, however desperate. "I know… Ryuk, you can write the names down! Write their names down in your notebook! WRITE IT, RYUK! HURRY!" He was begging. It was completely unlike him, but he had no other choice. Unable to hear what Near was saying, he thought about how the only possible way for him to live through this and not end up in jail was to beg mercy from a Shinigami. He shivered at the thought of it…

"Sure… I'll write it," Ryuk told him. He was smirking, and Light would have recognized this had Ryuk not been his only hope. Instead of wondering why his Shinigami was smiling, like he should have been, he let himself smile and hope that maybe he HAD found a way to get out of this. Sure he would still need to go to a hospital, but maybe with Near gone and Ryuk on his side one of the others would consider helping him. Light Yagami truly _was_ God, he realized. He had managed to get out of what no one else would have even hoped to, by means no one else would have thought of. But then he was brought back to the reality of what Ryuk was saying… He realized that he hadn't won… far from it, in fact. And now HE was going to die… He couldn't believe it. There was no way this was happening. He, Light Yagami, Kira, could not have been defeated. He was too lost in his thoughts to realize what else Ryuk was saying, but he knew what it would be.

He had forty seconds left to live. The utter melodrama of the moment was unbelievable. Light still couldn't quite believe that he had _lost_, that he had failed the world and would never be able to give it the utopia he'd promised…

Thirty seconds left. He tried to accept it, but couldn't. He was over. Everything was over. Ryuk had said that a human would simply vanish into nothingness after they died, and Light was about to experience that for himself. He couldn't imagine not seeing… hearing… thinking anything. But, again, he couldn't.

Twenty seconds. Time swam by both immeasurable fast and inconceivably slowly. Nanoseconds stretched into hours into eternities which were pressed into no time at all. And God was dying…

Ten. In ten seconds, the world would begin regressing. He knew the notebook would be burned or otherwise made unusable, and the second people realized Kira had disappeared they would go back to their old ways.

Nine, eight… No one would take over for him. His efforts would all be for nothing.

Seven, six, five… And the criminals would run wild, the years of crime he'd been holding back flooding over the world, and innocent people would drown with no sense of justice to keep them afloat.

Four, three… And he, Light Yagami, _Kira_, _GOD, _would be dead. And there would be nothing.

One…  
And there was nothing.

At least, there was nothing at first.


	2. Chapter 2

When the nothing faded away, Light was overcome by his confusion. He remembered, perfectly, what had happened, and he knew he should be dead. He knew he had failed, and that he had abandoned the human world, but he didn't know where he was _now_. _Now_, or maybe it was called _then_ here, or sometime, somewhere else... _now_, it was white. Light wasn't sure if he was regaining his senses, because he only saw, heard,_ felt_ white. Like a cloud, but Light didn't believe in Heaven and knew if it existed he wouldn't be going there. No matter how good his intentions had been, he had probably—both indirectly and personally—killed more people than even the most successful of assassins. He knew any God, other than himself of course, would frown upon that. The average God probably wouldn't understand the idiocy of giving people second chances, so Light's use of the Death Note would be seen as unnecessary. And even_ with_ those stupid second chances, Light would have thrown out his second, third... thousandth with his repeated use of the Death Note. Not that he regretted this in any way.

The white was fading. Its sweet, heavy presence was evaporating into this new, dreadfully thin atmosphere so slowly its movement was almost unrecognizable. Light couldn't say for sure _how_ he knew it was fading; it was only giving way to more white, but something in him felt the shadows coming. He felt the shapes before he saw them, and the first to reach him did so as lightly as the buzz of a fly in his ear. When it evolved into a silhouette he was hit by a whisper of recognition, and spoke for the first time in this eternity. "M... Misa?" He gasped, not quite sure why_ she_ was here.

"LIGHT-KUN!" She exclaimed, "I was wondering when you'd show up!" As she walked closer, the white mist finally started to fold back into itself, and as soon as he was presented with a two-centimeter view and a sense of 'up', Light stood.

He looked down at the ground right next to his feet—so far it was the only thing he could see—and saw another shadow crawling into view. He knelt down again to pick it up, ignoring Misa, who was standing over him grinning like an idiot, and saw that it was a rotten, shriveled apple. And Light knew where he was.

"What's wrong, Light-kun?" Misa whimpered, leaning over and looking right at him with inhuman eyes.

"Nothing..." Light replied distractedly, too interested in his surroundings to think about his cumbersome and idiotic girlfriend. The mist was receding all around him and more landmarks came into view: expanses of desert and piles of bones that he knew from vague description but not from sight. "Misa," he began carefully, "do you know where we are?"

Misa, eager to help, replied excitedly, "YEAH! WE'RE WHERE REM LIVED AREN'T WE LIGHT?"

"Yes," he whispered. "We are. And do you know how we got here?"

Misa hesitated, very unlike herself. "Well... don't you remember? They said I shouldn't tell you if you didn't remember for yourself."

Light smiled. She was referring to him dying, of course. Whoever 'they' were—Shinigami, he was assuming—they wouldn't want to shock him as soon as he got here by telling him how he'd been killed. Whether they'd had a motive for bringing him here or if the Shinigami realm was just where users of the Death Note went, he wasn't sure. But either way it seemed as if he were a guest.

"Misa," he looked her in the eye and was startled again by how unnatural her Shinigami's eyes looked up close, "May I talk to 'them'?"

"Well..." she shuffled her feet uneasily. "I'm not sure you're _supposed _to, but if it would make Light-kun happy…?"

"Yes, it would." Light replied slowly. "Very happy."

"Then I'll do anything I can to make it so!" she squealed, very excited at the prospect of pleasing him.

"Thank you, Misa." Light smiled at her as she hurried away. Death hadn't changed her a bit.

Light sat back down, noticing that the mist had completely faded, leaving him with the unpleasant scenery of the Shinigami realm. Piled up bones warn hard and dry by wind and sand lay randomly scattered around him, doing little to break the monotonous wasteland. Past infinite shivering seas of unearthly sand and sheer, slate mountains rose. Their presence did not change the feel of the tedious landscape, nor did it add to the impression of nothingness the dead world bore like perfume. They were simply _there_, and Light was nearly sure that if he tried to walk to them they would continue to recede into the distance until he was forced to give up and admit that this world was flat and infinite and that he would never escape.

While waiting for Misa to return he held his sad excuse for an apple and thought of Ryuk; his annoying tail, his murderer and almost his friend. He also wondered how a human—if he still was one—was to survive in the world of the Shinigami. He seemed to be sitting under one of the few trees in this world, if you could call it a tree. The branches were gnarled and rotting and the few equally rotten apples clinging to them hung like sad little beetles, almost not caring whether they fell off and got buried in the sand. Light wondered vaguely in his newly acquired spare time in waiting for Misa where the Shinigami were. Ryuk had said that they liked to pass their time gambling, but Light didn't see any. He couldn't imagine anyone—or anything—sitting around to play cards in a place like this, but then again there couldn't have been much else to do. Except killing humans, of course...

He wondered why none of them chose to help him in killing criminals. Did it violate one of their rules, or was it just boring to them? They were rather pathetic, if they couldn't even help him create utopia when it was so _easy_ for them. No one suspects a Shinigami, obviously, and they wouldn't have had to worry about threats from the human world. They wouldn't have to fear being killed, either, like he should have...

Light spent the remainder of the time it took Misa to return envisioning not only his perfect world, but a world in which he would never die, and he wondered if he'd found one.


End file.
